Going Vegan: Introduction

Meals are part of my responsibility as a road spouse.  We have a kitchen, which is rare for this lifestyle, and we're taking advantage of it by cooking.

Cooking more means I grocery shop more, and anyone who shops a lot gets into a routine.  When we lived in Wisconsin, part of our routine was buying and drinking a gallon of milk a week.  Now in Ohio, we're lucky to finish a gallon before it expires.  Dairy's not as enticing outside of Wisconsin.

Challenging SB to go vegan (consume no meat, no dairy, no egg) in February was the next logical leap.

At first, I thought she'd scouff and ridicule.  To my surprise, she was receptive and accepted the challenge without pleading.  In fact, she's excited to see how the new diet affects her.

Before we discover the affects though, we have to survive the learning curve of changing diets.  When going vegetarian, my brain needed training to read labels, check restaurants for veggie-friendly dishes, and not absentmindedly grab bacon from a nearby plate.  This lead to a couple of false starts.  Going vegan will require a similar reprogramming.

About two-thirds of how we eat now is vegan, so the curve won't be too steep.  It's the additions to our meals that make them non-vegan, like milk on cereal, cheese on...everything, condiments, etc.  We'll have to learn how to avoid these easy additions and find substitutes.

Finding substitutes can be expensive, but going vegan should help us save money in other ways.  Our bi-weekly grocery bill is about $100 on average, but the first vegan grocery bill was just over $150.  That's a 50% increase.

We shouldn't spend as much eating out, however.  Already we're planning on forgoing meals on trivia night at Maumee Bay Brewing Company.  We did find a Mediterranean restaurant called Zingos that has vegan options.  It will be a once-a-week trip at best.

One part of our food and drink budget that shouldn't change is beer money.  This might be controversial and allow people to say we're not going vegan, or even vegetarian for that matter.  Some brewers use animal products to filter out yeast and other cloudy minerals while brewing.

Despite not actually ingesting animal, some vegetarians have a problem with the use of dead animal in the process.  We don't, but we'll use Barnivore, a website dedicated to finding vegetarian and vegan beers, to dictate what we drink.

For us, going vegan is a dietary decision rather than a moral one.  It's true that human diets evolved to rely on meat for a quick source of iron and proteins, but there are always consequences to doing anything quick and unconsciously.

In the next post, I'll try to answer why we're going vegan, and how my response won't be enough for some of you.